Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will likely accept bitcoin for vehicle purchases again.
“It looks like Bitcoin is shifting a lot more towards renewable energy and a number of the high-capacity coal-fired power plants that have been used have been shut down, particularly in China,” Musk said at the B-Word conference on Wednesday. an event by the Crypto Council for Innovation.
“I would like to take a little more care to confirm that the share of renewables is most likely at or above 50% and that there is a trend towards this number increasing. If so, Tesla will most likely accept Bitcoin again, ”he said.
In May, Musk said on Twitter that the company would stop buying vehicles with Bitcoin amid concerns about the “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining.”
Since then, Beijing has cracked down on crypto, expelling the country’s crypto miners who have since begun patriating elsewhere. New data from Cambridge University shows that many miners are traveling to the US, which is now the second largest destination for the world’s bitcoin miners.
The US has some of the cheapest energy sources in the world, most of which are renewable. Marathon Digital’s Fred Thiel said most miners new to North America are powered by renewable energy or gas are offset by renewable energy credits, and Compass CEO Whit Gibbs estimates that bitcoin mining in the US is too more than 50% is powered by renewable energies.
“In the long run, renewable energy will be the cheapest energy, but that won’t happen overnight,” Musk said. “But as long as there is a conscious and determined, genuine effort by the mining community to switch to renewable energy, Tesla can obviously support that.”
Bitcoin was trading almost 8% higher on Wednesday.
